ALEXANDRA LEYKAUF

Starting point for the exhibition was the very specific architecture of the Kunstverein Langenhagen, a former bowling alley, that is: one single bowling alley and a room attached to it at one of its narrow sides with a storefront window to the street. Looking at the floor plan I couldn’t help but seeing the contour lines of a camera with the long tunnel shaped space being the lens and the room now used as a second exhibition space/office being the camera body. I understood the window to the street as the viewfinder of the camera and reversed the view through the camera,
i.e. exhibition space, by taking a picture of this window and the view onto the street.
I then closed the window with a big printout of the street view and the surrounding darkness of the underexposed interior so that, standing on the street, one faces the reproduced sight in one’s back. As I added to the surrounding blackness I suggested a further distance than the space would actually allow me to capture.

The second work, sprockets, takes up the idea of view finding and framing. It is based on a cross shaped cardboard model consisting of two intersecting rectangles with two vacancies in the proportions of the window. The four photographs taken of the model’s quarters are printed large and applied onto a wooden construction following the prototypical model, with the difference being that the blank spaces in the cardboard model are only present in the prints, not in the wooden carrier.

The alley was divided by a back projection screen showing the slide show Trebron. 
The work came into being in two steps. First I took 80 slides of a figure walking from the horizon towards the camera. Then I reproduced those 80 slides by placing a slide projector on one side of a back projection screen and a camera on the reverse side. 
In the original slides the figure is only recognizable as a small dot on the horizon until it fills step by step the camera frame. In the reproductions the figure is always kept at the same size, because I removed the camera successively from the projection screen. The first reproduction is an enlargement of the figure on the horizon, half way through the original slide is reproduced 1:1 and in the last slide the original image is sitting as a small rectangle within a large black area. Two contrary movements cancel each other out. The approaching of the figure is prevented by the withdrawal of the camera, respectively the apparent distancing of the image field.

The last work Kreise consists of a photogram and a two-part slide projection. For the projection 80 black cardboard circles, subsequently increasing in diameter, were photographed with b / w negative film. The negatives were doubled, put into slide frames and projected onto the photogram with two projectors, one of which emits red, the other one green light. On the b / w negatives the black circles appear as transparent openings through which the red, respectively green light transgresses onto the photogram. Since the projectors do not run synchronously, and because mixed red and green light produces white light, a white circle is visible on the photogram surrounded by either a red or a green circle. 
The photogram is a multiple-exposure of the cardboard circles used for the slides. It shows a small white center and rings in darkening shades of grey towards the black margins of the paper.
A movement in time, as it is produced by the projection, is condensed into one image on the photogram.